The present invention, the Physician Office Viewpoint Survey System and Method [POVS], relates generally to a system and method for collecting and presenting information, and more particularly to a system and method for collecting, processing, and presenting information on (1) a respondent's health status; (2) respondent's experience at a health provider's location; (3) personal information about respondent (e.g., age, gender, health information); (4) a health provider's fiscal performance and (5) quality parameters based on these, and other, collection data (including other surveys and processed information).
Conventional approaches for surveying consumers of products and services, such as health care services, generally use standard survey forms or questionnaires, whereby an agent calls or visits a survey participant and performs the survey. Alternatively, the participant may be mailed a survey form for completion.
However, these methods of performing surveys are inefficient and often inaccurate. Individual agents are typically used to perform the survey, and to tally and process the results into an assessment as to how well an organization is performing. Although computers are likely to be used to analyze the survey data, human agents are still typically used to enter the data into a computer or to perform the actual survey questioning. Unfortunately, human agents are expensive to hire, increasing survey costs, and humans often make mistakes, leading to survey inaccuracies.
In traditional surveys a series of questions asked one after another in a static, sequential order. The surveys are collected, perhaps, by the respondent filling out a paper form or with a skilled questioner asking the respondent questions, with the results compiled after the survey is completed, often after a delay of weeks or months, providing stale information. Such traditional surveys use standard sets of questions that cannot gather information with insight into the reasons for the responses. Desirable are automated survey programs that capture the logic a skilled questioner (for example, a process consultant or a physician) uses to glean knowledge about a process or a patient.
It would also be desirable to have better surveying techniques utilizing data from different sources (such as patient information about physician office process, employee satisfaction data, and practice fiscal performance data) which are combined as the data are collected, analyzed immediately, with that information being presented across the internet in real time once collected, and immediately available.
It would be further desirable if survey information were made ready for presentation using an information rich graphical display method. One such method, using a particular clinical improvement process, is the subject of a co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 10/011,014 titled “Method And System For Presentation Of Survey And Report Data”, incorporated herein by reference, which uses a clinical improvement process utilizing a “compass” viewpoint presentation format (described therein, and hereinbelow). Using such a graphical display format, the information can be presented so that the end user gets a balanced scorecard presentation of the things that can affect the physician office environment.
Survey capabilities that would prove useful to service providers in general, and more specifically, medical care providers, are those that collect data from individuals about the service, e.g., the health care delivery experience, providing nearly instantaneous reports that include, for example, information: 1) from patients about their experience while visiting physician offices; 2) from patients about their ability to do activities of everyday life (“Functional Health Status”); 3) from patients about their age, gender, and condition specific health needs; and 4) from physician office employees about their experience of work, and from the office manager about the efficiency of the health care office.
The Integrated Communication System [ICS], described in application Ser. No. 09/871,279 and incorporated herein by reference, provides a tool that can be used to automate the survey process to reduce the number of human beings utilized in the survey process, to increase the accuracy, reduce the costs, improve the efficiencies, and overcome the shortcomings of current techniques identified above.
The ICS utilizes modern computer and networking technology, along with advances in automated voice recognition, database design, computer processing, and computer networking, all to provide means to improve the process of performing a survey. Accordingly, the ICS can provide a platform to overcome some of the shortcomings of traditional means of evaluating the quality of services of a health care provider (such as physician offices) that were identified above. The Integrated Communication System (ICS) can be used in a similar manner that a database programmer would use a commercially available software development environment to build a commercially available computer software program.
Using the ICS programming environment, survey programs can be developed to collect relevant data from respondents in real-time to exclude or include large amounts of query material specifically relevant to the particular individual being queried. Only questions relevant to the specific respondent are asked, and large bodies of information are avoided. Data from respondents is analyzed, compared to normative population data, and presented graphically to the respondent and other users of the program for action.
The POVS uses the ICS environment to capture the logic of a skilled questioner (a physician, a process consultant) by codifying subject mater knowledge and logic in a series of immediately executable commands that allow the computer to ask a series of logically connected and interdependent questions. The sequence and scope of the questions parallels that of a skilled observer of physician office function and/or of a physician asking questions about a person's health. The invention also processes the collected information to provide the health care provider with useful quality information using the compass viewpoint paradigm, providing the health care provider with tools and information to assess the quality of his organization's product(s) and/or service(s).